Online advertising may be an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a web page to be configured to display advertisements. Advertisements may commonly be found on many web sites. For example, advertisements may be displayed on search web sites and may be targeted to individuals based upon search terms provided by the individuals.
One metric for measuring the success of advertisements is the click-through rate (“CTR”). The CTR may be used for measuring an advertisement's past success or for predicting an advertisement's future success. For sponsored searching, the displayed advertisements may be ranked based on a bid amount and a predicted future success, such as a click probability or an estimated CTR. In order to optimize the display of advertisements and to maximize revenue from that advertisement, the probability of click should be an accurate estimate.